It is generally believed that it would be desirable to produce a surgical lighting system that can eliminate the need for a surgeon or scrub nurse to manually move a surgical light with their hands to provide focused lighting at the surgical site. Such a system would prevent undue contamination of instruments as a result of transfer of bacterium from lamp handles, allow surgical personnel to focus their attention to more important tasks such as instrument passing, and alleviate the need for low-hanging, reachable lamp handles which may obstruct the surgical flow.
There exist several different approaches to alleviate this problem. U.S. Pat. No. 5,093,769 by Luntsford discloses a surgical lighting system which is remotely controlled by surgical personnel. This system is also capable of “recording” a sequence of lamp configurations which can be “played back” during time of surgery. Another solution as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,560,492 by Borders describes a system which can control several aspects of operating room function such as: patient table movement, temperature control, and lighting intensity. The solution by Luntsford eliminates the need for surgical personnel to manually move surgical lamps by allowing them to remotely control the lamps, but does not totally eliminate the need to have surgical personnel to initiate such movements, and is therefore only semi-automatic. The solution by Borders suffers from a similar downside, as a user is required to control the disclosed system. Border's solution offers to modulate the intensity of the surgical lights, but does not allow for movement of said lights.
The system disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,642,836 by Wang et al discusses a device which utilizes voice recognition to control various machines in the operating room including lights. However this system still requires a surgeon or assistant to initiate the lamp movement using their voice, and is thus only semi-automatic. Also, the voice recognition system introduces the complication of voice-recognition which may not always be accurate.